Embedding Documents with Google Docs

October 21, 2012

Embedding documents can provide a way for website visitors to view documents without having to download them to their computers. We used this on the interview transcript, process paper, and bibliography pages of our website. This is a method to embed documents in Weebly without having to use Scribd.

Instructions

Upload the document through the Weebly editor using a file element.1 Note: this only works for certain file types. Google Docs cannot embed .docx and .doc files. PDFs seem to work best, so export your Word documents as PDFs and upload those instead.

Publish the website and visit the page with the newly uploaded document.

Right click on the “Download file” link and choose “Copy Link Address” or equivalent.

Paste your link into the field below and press "Generate HTML".

Copy the HTML code that is generated for you.

Go back to the Weebly editor, create an HTML element2 on the page, and paste the code you copied into it. Done!3

Paste the link to your uploaded document:

Generated HTML Code:

Copy the code from the text box above and paste it into an HTML element in Weebly.

Alternatively, you can manually edit the code below and add it into an HTML element:

Once you’ve got the embedded file to appear, you can adjust the height and width numbers in the code to change the size of the embedded document.

Footnotes

1: Don’t delete this file element, otherwise the file embed won’t work! Also note that this is not the “document” element, but rather the “file” element.2: This might also be called an “embed code” element, or something along those lines, in the Weebly editor.3: You might not see the embedded document until you publish the website and view it live.